


drenches what's dry

by bog gremlin (tomatocages)



Series: trope bingo fills [9]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Childhood Sweethearts, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Meet-Cute, Short One Shot, Veterinary Clinic, re-meet cute???
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:21:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28455258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomatocages/pseuds/bog%20gremlin
Summary: Keith works too hard and gets by with the help of his loyal pets and fond memories of his first husband. "First husband" meaning, of course, the boy from the playground who synchronized swings with Keith when they were children.He just never expected to see Shiro again.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Series: trope bingo fills [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1679653
Comments: 16
Kudos: 151





	drenches what's dry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AnnaofAza](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnaofAza/gifts).



> for Anna! | from redluxite’s trope bingo , prompt O-5: “We broke up before but for some reason we are in contact again and my stupid heart still loves you gdi”
> 
> I couldn't actually write a breakup. Originally posted on Twitter circa March 2020; this fic has been edited and expanded.

And you know it

when you see it, don’t you? How it

drenches what’s dry, how the having

of it quenches.

— from  [ The Hush of the Very Good, Todd Boss ](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49179/the-hush-of-the-very-good)

* * *

Keith will never be over his first husband. It sounds dramatic to put it that way, especially considering that his first husband was a playground tryst when he was six. But Keith hasn’t had… a great time of things in the past twenty-odd years. It’s nice to remember holding hands with Shiro on the swings, pumping their legs in time with the rise and fall until they equalized and someone yelled, “they’re married!” 

Shiro had laughed, and before Keith could feel embarrassed, called back: “Keith and I are married!” It was an affirmation, full of joy. He’d looked over at Keith, still clasping his hand, and added, “we’ll live happily ever after.”

It hadn’t mattered that Shiro was one of the older kids on the playground, or that Keith was small for his age. Holding hands, swinging on swings, the afternoon light painting that memory deep gold — there’s no way to get over that. Keith’s never even tried. 

It’s harmless, Keith thinks, to remember a time when he was wanted. Every relationship since then — after his father died and Keith went into care and never got to go back to the playground with Shiro — has been a losing game. Keith got tired of playing it early on, and opted to protect his heart.

It’s not all bad; he has a cat and a dog. He lives with a batch of roommates he can stand enough to share a kitchen with. He works nights cleaning office buildings because working days at the vet clinic doesn’t pay well, but he can at least bring the dog and cat to work with him. 

Kosmo is good about the job; he likes the commute (three miles) and he gets to play with the other dogs in the day-boarding center attached to the clinic. If he weren’t allowed to bring Kosmo, Keith thinks, the dog might just teleport to wherever Keith is working; they’re attached. Some asshole abandoned the puppy outside the clinic and Keith had begged to try and rescue him. The vet had grimly bagged a carton of formula and a stack of towels, and Keith had called in sick and missed over a week at his night job that he couldn’t afford to skip. It was a gamble, just to sleep on the floor next to a heat lamp and feed the puppy with a syringe every hour, and rub its swollen belly until it shit all over the rags. But they’d made it through, somehow, and Kosmo seemed determined to stay by Keith’s side no matter what happened on the road ahead. (Keith was training Kosmo to not lie across the employee exit door at his night job, but that wasn’t going so well. It was a good life. Keith supposed he shouldn’t expect miracles.)

The cat, on the other hand, was a recent acquisition, one that spent much of the day perched behind Keith’s computer and hunching its face over the top edge of the screen, like a terrible vulture-slash-webcam that licked Keith’s bangs every time he had to lean close to the monitor. 

This exact thing was occurring on Wednesday (why was it always a Wednesday?), when everything changed. 

It took about half an intake form for Keith to realize that the new client wasn’t exactly new to him, but by that time, Shiro had already recognized him. 

“Keith! You probably don’t remember me, but — ”

“Shiro?” Keith tried to lean around the monitor to get a better look, and the cat lunged for him. She caught him with an enthusiastic tongue-washing that went from the edge of his jaw almost all the way up to his eye. “Agh, Pickles, what the hell? — Shiro from the playground in Garrison Heights?”

“Yeah!” Shiro smiled, and it was like the sun rising. He was tall — taller than Keith’s memory — and there was a scar across his nose, his hair gone white, but he still looked like the gilded memory of the last time someone agreed to love Keith. “I can’t believe it’s you! You disappeared one day and I thought I’d never see you again!”

Ah, Keith thought to himself, and tried to cushion himself against how much it would hurt when this one last thing he’d saved for himself went away. He wasn’t stupid about the memory — he went on dates occasionally, when his coworkers set him up and he was too hungry to pass up the free meal, and he’d never said he had been married, because playground promises weren’t exactly date discussion topics. Or based in reality. 

“What’s your animal’s name?” Keith asked on autopilot.

“Atlas,” Shiro said, and thrust the carrier forward so Keith and Pickles were face-to-nose with the largest Norwegian Forest cat Keith had ever seen. “He’s three — ”

Atlas let out a little trill of curiosity and Pickles stopped licking the skin off Keith’s face in order to shove her nose up against the bars of the carrier. Atlas purred in response, loudly. 

“Hi baby, you wanna make a friend?” Shiro crooned at Pickles, and, like an idiot, opened the carrier so Atlas can lumber onto the counter. 

Keith was too stunned for words. He never thought his first husband would be — like this. This was so far away from both veterinary waiting room protocol and Keith’s own soft daydreams that he was not just out of his depth, he was unexpectedly exploring the bottom of the Marianas Trench. 

“Anyway,” Shiro said, like a normal person, stroking Atlas with one hand and using the other to chuck Pickles under her chin. “He’s fine, but I’m new to the area and wanted to make sure he’s up on his vaccines. Oh my gosh, aren’t you a princess?” This last directed (hopefully) at Pickles, who had whored herself out for scratches. It was hard to discern her rattling purr over the basso profundo reverberations of Atlas.

“Sure,” Keith said. “Um. Pickles, honey — ” and he was interrupted by Kosmo emerging from the back office and rearing up to balance on his hind legs, front paws planted next to Keith’s keyboard. 

“A princess and another baby!” Shiro laughed and abandoned Atlas — his own cat! — in favor of leaning even further into Keith’s space to offer his palm to Kosmo. 

Kosmo considered Shiro for a moment, probably noting Keith’s discomfort — Kosmo was the greatest dog in the world — and then he huffed and licked Shiro once before leaning heavily into the offered touch. 

Which meant he pushed Keith out of his chair. Of course Keith’s life was becoming a Disney movie, just gone horribly gone awry. 

Kosmo was a traitor.

Despite knowing he wouldn’t lose his job for disrupting a client intake or whatever, Keith still tried to hold on to the last vestiges of his professional script. From the floor, hidden beneath his desk, he managed to ask, “can I have a phone number?” 

He really needed to clean under the desk more often. The computer cables were coated with cat hair, which had to be some kind of fire hazard. There was an old stain that looked suspiciously like it was from the last time Acxa spilled coffee at the desk. Acxa always spilled coffee and blamed it one someone else, but she was the only staffer who didn’t put the lid on her travel mug. 

To his shock, Shiro responded to this minor catastrophe by vaulting over the counter and kneeling on the floor beside Keith. Kosmo behaved similarly: he dropped back down to the floor and wiggled under the desk. It felt like living in a blanket fort and suddenly being overrun with visitors.

“Are you all right?” Shiro grabbed onto Keith’s shoulder and slid him out from under the desk ( _ No, _ Keith thought, mournfully; it was safer under there). He placed his free hand across the back of Keith’s skull, which was the only thing that saved Keith from knocking against the sharp edge of his keyboard tray on the way back up. “Of course you can have my number, I was about to ask  _ you  _ — ”

It was fortunate that Pickles and Atlas decided to visit the floor, where Keith was now sitting, halfway in Shiro’s lap. It was a nice lap, a wonderful lap; Shiro’s thighs were almost as big around as Keith’s waist, and Keith found himself feeling a bit faint. He was not sure he could blame the sensation on poor nutrition. 

The cats swarmed, Pickles oozing up onto the other half of Shiro’s lap — she was a demon, but she had good taste — and Atlas delicately clawed up Keith’s front in order to shove his fluffy, wedge-shaped head against Keith’s face.

_ Good,  _ Keith thinks. Maybe Atlas could smother him.

“For the client file,” Keith said. It wasn’t really intelligible, which might have been for the best. “I need a phone number for your client file.”

“Oh,” Shiro said. He was quiet for a minute, and Keith started petting Atlas in a nervous response. But the minutes kept ticking by — whole minutes, not just interminable seconds — and Shiro didn’t let go of Keith, and Pickles started purring again, and Kosmo tried to lay across Keith’s lap. As far as traps went, this was the nicest one he’d ever been caught in. 

“I’d still give you my number,” Shiro said. “Not for the client file, I mean.”

Before Keith could respond to this — declaration? — Acxa emerged from the depths of the office to find out why Keith hadn’t been calling patients into the exam room. She saw the spectacle on the floor and pulled out her phone. “Smile,” she said, utterly deadpan. “You can put the photo on your Christmas card this year.”

“I’m Buddhist, actually.” It was possible Shiro was trying to be helpful, but Keith didn’t think it was working. Shiro nudged the animals off of their combined laps and stood, hefting Keith up with him like a bride. 

Keith wasn’t used to being hefted and briefly turned into a creature with one hundred percent more elbow than previously indicated by his stature. But even a sharp, accidental nudge to the kidney didn’t perturb Shiro in the slightest. 

“Whatever,” Acxa said. “You should really keep your cat kenneled. Can’t believe your boyfriend didn’t tell you that.”

“Oh,” Shiro responded, “Keith’s not my boyfriend. He’s my husband.”

* * *

Later — after Atlas’ checkup was finished and Keith attempted to cure his shellshock with a mocha cobbled together from a packet of non-dairy hot cocoa and an anemic, off-brand Keurig pod — Shiro apologized.

“I hope I didn’t make any problems for you at work,” he said. He’d taken Atlas out of the carrier again, and now the cat was wearing a smart little harness that allowed him a small circle of freedom, which he ignored in favor of sitting on Keith’s left foot. 

“I didn’t think you remembered,” Keith told him. 

Shiro smiled, a little wryly. It made the scar across his nose tug at little at each end, almost like it was a smile line instead of an old wound. Everything about Shiro’s face was appealing.

“Well,” he said, and Keith felt his chest swell with hope, “you never forget your first.” 


End file.
